Thursday, December 1, 2016

Sophocles, was a Greek general, who wrote the play Antigone, around 440 B.C. Creon is Antigone’s mother’s brother and his
son Haemon, is engaged to marry his cousin. Their marriage is doomed, because
Antigone’s brother, Polynices, returning from exile is killed in battle with
his own brother, Etiocles, who dies too.
With the death of Etiocles, Creon, as their nearest relative, ascends the
throne. Antigone, her sister Ismene, Etiocles and Polynieces are all children
of Oedipus, who through ignorance slept with his mother, and then put out his
eyes, when he came to know of the terrible sin he had unwittingly committed.

The chorus has the most important part to
play, and through its sepulchral lines it intervenes at all levels to counsel.
We, too benefit on hearing it’s voice, for they say, ironically speaking of
fate, “The future is ordered by those
who should order it.” Destiny lulls us
into accepting our fate, and free will liberates us.

The real focus of the play is the arrogance of Creon, who
dispenses justice by the measure of his egoism, and it counterposes Antigone’s love for the divine, and for the ordinances of
the Gods, which she will not disobey. There is some cultural motive, some social habit, or instinct
here, of separating the human from the
animal, some space of tremendous courage, where the love for the brother,
amounts to a duty, which involves honouring the body, in death.

We often carry out commands because we have
no alternative, much like the population of Thebes which was given to mutter.
We are under the rule of a variety of despots, national and international, who
make no bones about their ability to rule over the destiny of humans. We are
pushed and buffeted by oligarchies. We know that school children are blinded by pellets, in
Kashmir, that people are shot in Manipur and not given a burial, but unlike
Antigone, we do not press for enquiries and justice. Curiously, though, human beings everywhere, resist
despotism. They protest, they flee, they resist.

Demonetisation came upon the Indian public
without warning, since hoarders and black money funds had ostensibly to be pounced upon, by submitting
all to the same punishment. No one has asked
about hawala and Swiss bank accounts, or the role of the Income Tax department
in revealing where exactly the black money lies.

People have stood in queues, and have got
used to it. They are adjusting to the new dispensation much as if it were a war
zone, where rations will soon be distributed through just such queues.As those vulnerable, and accepting of
government claims to legitimation of these political drives, they must accept their fate.

Ismene pleaded with Creon to release
Antigone, and then pleaded with Antigone in turn to accept her, “But amidst
your troubles I am not ashamed to make myself your companion in misfortune.” Ismene has many lines in the play, trying
desperately to mediate, speaking as a woman, who understands that laws when
passed are totalising, and subjects have no voice. She tries so hard totranslate between hersister and Creon, bringingin Antigone’s faithful lover Haemon into her
conversation with Creon, using marriage as a plea for her sister’s life.
Antigone will not accept Ismene’s delayed overture, for her brother lay without
ritual burial, and Ismene had initially refused
to help her.

The
Indian population seems Ismene like, believing that the Finance Minister and
the RBI had together really, really wanted to prove the loyalty of the people
to their Prime Minister. Meanwhile, the five hundred and the thousand rupee
notes lie, waiting to be ritually incinerated. The freedom of speech allows
many to ask, “Is digitalisation, electricity dependent and hacker vulnerable,
really the answer to an economy such as ours?” Do we really want to do away
with the friendly grocer who provides the busy housewife with credit when
needed and conversation between routine tasks. Do we all want to stand in malls
to have Reliance company vegetables sent in by phone and card? Do we want to
supportrapid industrialisation which
will pull out iron from holy mountains and render local communities destitute
so that urban roads can be further clogged, or outer space rendered dissolute
with war heads and missiles piling up? We have a right to our opinions, and the
Greens movement worldwide has supported tourism and local communities, with
their horticultural and organic food farms. These are political movements as
much as ideological ones. If the hostile terrains had people friendly policies,
such as access to food, medicine, shelter and education the death rates on all
sides would immediately decrease. We could extend this to international
politics, which have created a dead land of continuous bombing in the Middle
East. Terrorism terrifies, but so does totalitarianism. Creons appear
everywhere.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Malthusian economics, as we know well from
the works of Charles Dickens, was essentially posed to get rid of the poor and
usher in the industrial revolution. Today, we understand the digitalisation
revolution as an ongoing aspect of just such similar politics, as preliminary
to the journey to Mars. By forcing the population into the strait jacket of
conformity to a laboratory society, the Modi government has made it very clear
the politics ofits extremism. Ghettoisation
of Muslims in Gujerat was the first step, Extinction of the Poor the second, as
this government supports industrialised farming and conspicuous consumption,
promising smart cities and sanitised waterfronts. Amit Shah promises a car to
every villager, as he does not have to face the traffic jams and the poison gas
of the city of Delhi, in his siren wailing, gun toting -security guarded,airconditioned and curtained car.

In America, Trump’s victory establishes the
reign of similar right wingers. There too, the poor will be sent off to war, to
“fight for their country”. The poor are enlisted from the agricultural
populations in stifled hinterlands, and those who in the city,find no other avenues to work. They are
promised University education, on their return, or are treated for medical and psychiatric
disorders in state funded camps. While they work very hard to normalise, their
real life is represented in the patterns of loneliness and despair, and
constant running away, mentally and physically, that makes them typical of a
new class of refugees. The occupation of war keeps the arms manufacturing, the
medical industry and the insurance companies well integrated with the genetic
manipulation of food industries.

A demonetised proletariat in India is
rendered servile, and kept from earning their daily wages. They are subjugated
by the machineries of the state, which include private security agencies,as well as police, who threaten them with
dire consequences should they break out of the interminable queues to which
they are shackled, in order to buy their bare necessities. A death here and
there, a suicide now and then, are all flecked off as the unnecessary detritus
of a well oiled state machinery that speaks to itself.The banalities of Mr Jaitley can only come
from being completely out of touch with the every day life of the nation. As
for the black money, it is turning into white, at the invitation of the
government, and we presume that the quantities of used notes will now be
recycled into making new notes, which will return to the public, when the
machines have been recalibrated. Everyone waits anxiously in queues to withdraw
from the bank, and to pay the daily labourers they may employ as carpenters or
gardeners or maids. The ideologies of the political parties are varied, so each
political party, which has behaved exactly as we expect them to do, which is
populist and petty bourgeoisie, including the Communists, ask the same
question, “Why were we not told?”

Trump’s contribution to war mongering has
been so arrogant, that it causes some embarrassment to the viewer. Modi’s call
to war against terrorism carries much the same rhetoric. By demonetisation, the
State’s coffers are full, and war is one way of spending the cash. Let’s hope
that the military does not become a collective of mercenaries looking to
exchange lives for promised pensions. When the Government said, after a tragic
suicide by an ex soldier that thepromised OROP was onlyto collect
votes, the nation was completely startled. A young girl’s suicide after several
attempts to get money out from the bank has been horrific. No one more than the
Indian media has been alert to the travesties of justice in this government.
Can we just stop to ask why the RSS thinktanks in the Government would believe
that they can do what they want, without thinking of the consequences. The
Ambanis are not in the news, the Adnanis have everything their way, the Swiss
accounts of those who siphoned money out of the country are in a haze of
anonymity. The rich do not look discomfited one bit, their credit cards are
numerous, and their servants stand in queues for them. Whose laughing now all
the way to the bank?

Prime Minister Modidid not know that majority of Indian people
are not yet digitalised, because they are wage workers, whomay have mobile phones, but only literacy and
computer skills allow for internet banking? For those who are elderly, or first
generation literate, the miniscule screen of the mobile blips too fast, before
they can punch in the required information. We know, even in the case of 40
naval officers who lost money in internet banking, that education and power are
not enough to tackle the hackers in IT.

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

The
late K.M Mathew, describes in his autobiography, the famous Mammen Mappillai
family, founders of the Malayala Manorama in Kerala. Written at the age of 90
years, Mathew wanders through a labyrinth, with the help of his mother’s ring,
symbolising love and integrity, left to him by his father, who had melted down
his wife’s ornaments and had a ring soldered for each of his children. So, K M
Mathew calls his memoir, “Ettam Modram” or “The Eighth Ring”,(Penguin Viking 2015) as he was the eighth
child.

The book takes on the analogy of the
Ancient Mariner, with the parallel of the sea farer who tells a tale, but we
remain transfixed as readers as the author writes about the travails of the
family which go through unusual situations of wealth and poverty. It is as much
a history of Kerala, told from the point of view of dominant caste politics, as
well as their relationships with their friends and those who servedthem. One of the chapters is devoted totally
to the collusion politics ofC.P Ramawami
Aiyar against the St Thomas Christians and the Mammen Mapillai family in
particular. Participation in the Freedom Movement by the author’s father, ,
eight years in prison and then to return broken hearted to the bedraggled
circumstances of their lost fortunes is told with intimate detail. The banks
that Mammen Mappilai owned were shut down, the newspaper closed, and the family
had to restart it’s ventures.

“Appachen could not bear the disappointment
when the establishment that he had nurtured with his dreams and hard work, and
that had grown to become the biggest insurance company in India, changed hands.
It had flourished better than our bank. I sometimes think that even if it had
not crashed, both the bank and the insurance company would anyway have been
nationalised later, in 1969. The insurance company that Chaidambaram Chettiar
took over from us became a part of the Life Insurance Corporation of India, the
LIC, when all the insurance companies in the country were nationalised.” (128)

Failure was not an embarrassment to the
Mammen Mappillai family. The women kept cows and sold the milk to support the
family. They all lived together, when circumstances forced them to, shifting
out to their own homes when their economic condition improved. Their lovely
home at Kuppapuram, near Allapuzha town became their icon, in the days
whenseveral members of the family were
shunting around in small housesin
Presidency towns, while finding new trades. The balloon factory became their
first successful business during the second world war, with it’s market in
Bombay, where one of the brothers lived and traded. The factory itself was in
one of their tea plantations,in
Kerrikunda in Chikmagalur District. The smell of latex killed off one of their
brothers, K.M. Jacob or Chacko, who had resisted the appearance of the factory
next to hiswell maintained colonial
bungalow, in the tea estate. However, the profit motive and the good of the
familyas a cluster, was seen to be
sufficient reason to establishthe
factory, in spite of the resistance of the brother who had inherited the family
gene for bad lungs.

How
the balloon factory led the way to the Madras Rubber Factory is an enthralling
story.TheManorama Family keeps its rural sensibility,
and overthrows a multinational company, using their wit, loyalty of workers,
and adherence to norms. Tragedy overtakes them many times, but they just pick
themselves up and start again. Among his father’s papers Mathew finds a note to
the children about losses incurred while building an empire. These include the
failure of a chit fund, which is a type of local banking; a lemon grass
producing oil unit; a wholesale business in Kottayam; a coir processing unit;
losses incurred in the Kottanad, Tamarasserry, and Nilambur estates; ship
purchased and losses incurred; a cigarette factory; a tile factory; losses in
land purchased in Punalur, Chengars, Pullikkanam. (199)Ofcourse these losses were nothing to the
closing down of the bank, insurance company and newspaper, during the time when
C.P ruled Kerala in the name of the regent.

The women K.M. Mathew writes about dominate
the narrative. His mother always hired a house in Alleppey, to have her babies,
since she didn’t want to give birth in Kuppappuram which flooded
regularly.His sisters in law are marked
by their grit and effeciency. As for romantic love, K.M. Mathew suggests that
he never had cause to think about women before his marriage, because it was not
the custom. His love for his wife, Annamma is apalpable and grateful lovewhich
was immortalised through a biography of the same name, which I look forward to
reading. Docility and authority were the two virtues women were meant to have,
apparently.

Friday, October 28, 2016

Perumal Murugan spoke
in Delhi,on August 22nd
2016, at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, after his two books, One Part Woman, (Maadhorubaagan) and Pyre, were publishedin English, by Penguin. The foremost question
insome people’s minds was, “Will you be
comfortable in metropolitan cities like New Delhi, Paris, or Berlin?” Murugan,
a quiet, self assured, soft spoken man made it very clear that he longed for
home, that he had never slept under a roof till he was twenty. The great
outdoors, the cowshed, the loveliness of the trees, the rich earth, that was
what he missed most, now that he had been forced out of the familiar places
which he was so intimate with.

One Part Woman
represents the Aradhaneswar cult, a soft and sensuous code for unmitigated
passion, when Parvati comes home to Siva, and merges into him. For those who
hated Murugan’s representation ofan
arbitrary coitus as serving the practical interests of people without children,
the traditions of local communities were forcibly sanitized by them, in popular
protests in order to write new cultural histories. Murugan however, was very
clear that tradition and history are suffused in our present. He believed that
fiction merely clothed emotions which still lie latent, and all the
possibilities of promiscuity, when conjoined by faith, deliver us into a
landscape that is peopled with other realities, other truths. To write
intimately of the wretchedness of traditional practice, with the seductiveness
of the novelist’s claim to represent reality, was his only crime. To be forced
to leave home because he told ahistorical tale, haunted his days, till theCourt came out with the verdict that he was
free to write, “Write!”

The holy hill at
Tiruchengode, Namakkal district, where theAradhaneswara(symbiosis of Shiva
and Parvati) cult still exists, is a site of tremendous power. The ancient
Saivite shrines illustrate that the cult of the goddess is dependent on the
absorption of the devi. Much of the advaitin principle of assimilation is
brought to our notice here, in the convergence of symbols, and the secret and
the hidden are represented as important symbols of a cosmic fertility. The
local community reinforces the idea not only of the vividness of sarpa worship,
which are chthonic reminders of ancient cultic forms before anthropomorphism
takes place, but are alsoemotional
organisers of contemporary representations of fear, sexuality and
effervescence. The rat, the boar, the elephant,the cow, the bull become the totemistic forms of the meeting of nature
and culture, where theirsacred and
aesthetic presence becomes of immense importance. Within this, the segregation
of local communities can be well located in terms of their personal relations
with the animal world. In the hill at Tiruchengode, Amba nestles with Durga,
which communicates the primacy of her status during Navarathri over other
manifestations of the divine.

The hierarchy that Hinduism imposes in tradition is
inviolable when the order of birth is prescribed by tradition. Perumal Murugan
describes this inviolability by looking at how each caste then represents its
order in terms of the consummation of its caste rules. Lower caste orthodoxies
can thus be as powerful as upper caste ones, they can be as forbidding and as
totalizing. The real world view of the poor then closes upon itself in terms
which are borrowed from varna, or colour, and the power of the presence of
existing rules can exclude as much as it can forbid. Love by itself can never
survive in the face of these terrible rules, they foreclose destiny, they
crumple free will.

Perumal Murugan, named after the great Lord at
Tiruchengode,now resides insolitude, in exile with his family inan unfamiliar urban milieu. Yet, the
landscape that he describes for us, is so over powering, so exquisite,that we can only dwell in the calmness of
these rural spaces. Here subsistence farming allows the Tamils their historic
splendor of unspoiled lands, withtheir
produce of groundnut, rice, sugar cane, jasmines, plantains, palm trees
(providing areca, dates, and nongu, and coconuts,) also the mangoes which
ornament every house, and themoringa
trees. The sea at Rameswaram, with its cross bow of water at nearby Dhanushkodi,
isvery close. The blue is turquoise and
grey, and the sun provides us adazzling
glimpse of this hot, unfettered land. Not far from Tiruchenkode, the
Uttarasumangalai temple presents us theremembrance of the whispered conversations of Siva and Parvati, an
upadeshawhich is love itself.

Saivite cults are open to all, choosing the massive hillocks
and flat plainsto communicate love and
valour. Here are Perumal Murugan’s people, his multi caste village, his green
topography of cultivated land on red soil thathe longs for most. Surely the Goddess at Tiruchengode will usher his
return home.

Thursday, October 13, 2016

We must believe that words have efficacy.
More importantly, we must hope that people believe what they say. War is an
easy word, and drumming for war makes the war mongers feel that they have a job
to do. Soldiers are people who have families, and while soldiering on is
something they do, occupationally, for love of the country, the war mongers see
them as fodder in war. The second world war was fought to end all wars. The
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasake left the molten shadows of men and women on
the kerbside as they ran.

Water wars are the worst, for our common
humanity becomes lost as we view the ‘other’ as the enemy. We always blame
someone else for our troubles. Colonial water sharing devices are out of sync
with modern needs, and egalitarian motives. Across the border, the Pakistani
enjoyment of lands is represented through 200 families owning most of the land.
As in India, when land redistribution occurred, the wealthy families gave away
unproductive lands to the cultivator farmer, and kept the better acreage. So
the ways in which we understand how tribals represent theforce of an illegal marauding army which in
India we call “terrorist”, is placed back in terms of how terrorism manipulates
emotions of border people. The line of no return faces us very soon in terms of
how we think of every day questions of blocking water to Pakistan, which the
present government thinks as practical.

These are mighty rivers, which cross the
borders of China, Pakistan and India. We have seen how floods over run North
East India, when dam work across the border releases excess water. If we block
the Indus, Punjab will be flooded and while boundary lines are political, river
basins are not. The arsenal that Pakistan develops is nuclear. If they bomb us,
they too will die. We do not live in isolation from one another. If the
emotional encroachment in Kashmir over years has been so huge, it is because
the local people have been singled out for attention by terrorist infiltration
and for martyrdom, by specialised training in camps. We have to be very clear
that the presence of the army in border areas is a natural phenomenon. The case
forterritorial supremacy in India is a
question of history. The British could never suppress the emotions ofpeopleof the North West or the North East of India, and over decades, the
Indian government was able to provide a sense of solidarity to tribal
communities in both areas to invest their sense of belonging to the presence of
the Centre. Federalism was seen to be the answer to these multi sited
loyalties. Kashmiri merchants following their trade routesarrived in all parts of India, without
feeling the necessity for secessionism. If we look at the protracted battle
between the Centre and the State, comprising Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, we must
presume that Kashmir is a part of a larger entity, and should it receive it’s
Azadi, then it will be surrounded by segments of the state which remain loyal
to the subcontinental image of India.

The map of Indiapresents it’s own logic of subcontinental
identity. Terrorism can never promote democracy, as Paul Wilkinson argues in
“Terrorism vs Democracy” ( Routledge 2001). The armoury of guerrilla warfare is
time tested, with successful results, and the price that the civilians have to
pay is huge. Where the state practise of terrorism gets in the way of
diplomacy, we have to understand that the grammar of mediation must come from
other legitimating institutions, such as ambassadorial functions of surrounding
countries. Without State support, the idea of freedom and autonomy, regarding
the right to work and travel may well be taken away from us by parochialising
interests which sees war as the first option available. Why should we think
that people across the borders of our country want to die? They would be the
first victims, and evacuation would create more wounded, more zones of loss and
privation.

Citizens’ forums have a great part to play
in both India and Pakistan. Their role is primary in avoiding war. Unless we
identify our share of common interests, the soldiers whom we value as true
patriots will die terrible deaths in war, or in post war camps. Anyone who has
been to Kargil, knows that the heroism of our soldiers cannot be disputed. Even
now, the stones leach blood. To put the army to dysfunctional use, by shooting
and killing citizens in Kashmir, who think differently from us,is a terrible act of finality. It is true
Gorbachov and Rasisa Gorbachov died in penury and singularly difficult
circumstances, but let us not forget the first lessons of the 1990s, the
lessons in dialogue.

Saturday, July 23, 2016

Hollywood uses a plethora of grey in the
new films that it makes for viewers incinema halls and of television. The subdued lighting, whether it is
space age fiction, or murder mysteries or espionage tales, all tell us that the
world has to be understood with it’s new significance, that there is no longer
black, white or colour, which will inform ourpost modern understanding. The subtlety of this choice is overplayed,
not just by shooting indoors, often in laboratory settings or in toned down
apartments, but the threat perception is exaggerated with evening scenes and
clouded skies.With post terrorism
appearing in the west, the battle lines have changed. The new forms of warfare
know no boundaries, there is no ethic, no sportsmanship on either side, and
even less,etiquette. The advertisement
breaks return the viewer to the real world, as there are routine chores for the
housewife,such as food to be prepared,
and water collected, before the family returns. In a way, the sophoric romances
too, so appealing to couch potatoes, have been replaced by sullen dramas which
paint old age as vicious, children as traumatic and traumatising, married
couples as continually adulterous or suspicious. However, when theviewer returns to the t.v, she finds the same
old advertisements are continually replaying. This nexus between the
advertisers and the channels are probably worth millions, but it’s boring to be
sold the same shampoos, soaps and face creams over and over again. It has the
desired effect of making the viewer feel that the traditional remedies of
orange or lemon scrub, papaya, turmeric, cream of milk and friendly oils such
as sesame, are quite out of the pale.

Fair skin for men and women is such a premium
that it makes one wonder what happened to the debates on skin colour and
racism. The dark good looks of Omar Sharif or the great Shakespearean actor Sir
Lawrence Olivier are a thing of the past. Their earthiness, their corporeality,
their passion have been replaced by the fervour, cunning, athleticism and
shockingly cereberal or erudite prowess of the new actors, well paid, handsome,
and in tune with the Star Wars manifesto of having blank faces and quickmoves. Indian viewers of Hollywood realise thatevery decade finds one or two takers, who can
mimic the west’s ideal of how tropical faces can assimilate Caucasian
orientations to beauty. Ofcourse, Priyanka Chopra, loved by admen, producers,
and viewers equally has entered the world of recognition by the West. But is
there a West, anymore? The world, through the contribution of Business
Processing Houses is singularly round, and dialects and accents produced
according to the consumer’s need. What makes the film industry so relevant is
that it jumps ahead of it’s times, it memorises the details of scientific
paraphernalia and jargon, is able to create Mars in studios, and to fly towards
the other planets, destroying the Moon on the way. However, earthlings always
struggle to keep the beauty of the earth going, and the simplest of
horticulturists appear to return the earth to its former naivete, before the
hazardous plants from scientific revolutions poisoned the earth.

Joan Kelly, one of the most powerful
feminists of the last century, asserted that the single parent household should
not be viewed as an anamoly. Would she conclude that even if one’s parent was
thousands of light years away, love itself is sufficient to keep the bonds of
the family together? Desire for knowledge, and for extra terrestrial
experiences is sufficient to make men and women, trained for the job, to set
aside the obligations to family and neighbourhood. The detachment, thus
experienced is not detrimental, but it allows for the evolution of society.
That society may not look like the one we know, or like, but the plane of
intergalactic experience is such, that the viewer is actually zoned in to
accept technological society as the ultimate good. In such a society, we have
no right to our personal feelings, our motivations, our ambitions. We must
submit to surveillance society, and the janitors who double officially as
keepers of the law. The law is ofcourse, concocted by the moment. It is the
oligarchy of technicians who decide what individuals may or may not do. The
appearance of the individualist is the greatest anarchic moment. Hollywood
states very clearly that whether it is war in the Arab countries against a
terrorist enclave, or mars wars, the orientation to the doctored voice is the
only clue the viewer has to what is good or evil.We must accept the simian in the cyborg as
Donna Harroway put it so brilliantly.

Friday, July 22, 2016

I was writing on the blackboard in Room 27,
Hindu College, Delhi University, when there was a knock on the door. It was a
man called Rajiv Lochan, not the artist, not the historian, but a Sociology
student from JNU, who wanted five minutes of my time. He quickly told me, in
the corridor, in a few sentences, that he wanted to compile a book of memories
about JNU, and would I write for him? He seemed very young, for such a
difficult task, but that’s the amazing thing about JNU, it produces mavericks
and gives them confidence beyond the common imagination. I called my essay “The
Years” but then Rajiv requested that I change the title to “The Days”, while he
appropriated The Years as the name of
the book of essays on JNU. Virginia Woolf would have been pleased.

Not long after, I went for an interview for
a job to JNU, and was delighted when I got it, a Readership at Centre for the
Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences. Dipankar Gupta and T.K.
Oommen, who usually never agreed on many issues, had agreed to take me on as a
faculty member. The confirmation of my appointment was held in Chandigarh,
according to Prof Mrinal Miri, (who was publisher of a book I had written for
IIAS Shimla,) so that any disputes regarding my appointment could be held at
bay. I just shrugged, since for me, being back at JNUas faculty had been a dream for twenty years.
While I had friends in Hindu College, every alumnus dreams ofreturning to JNU as if it were not a mother,
but a lover.The iconic sage,Agasthya ,too,
according to legend, was happy in theselow range Arravali hills before leaving forSouth India. Being married to the job was a
given. My husband was not happy at all when he heard I had applied to JNU. He
knew that as long as I was in Hindu College, I would write, teach, run home in
time for the children’s school bus. Our life together would be unhampered. Now,
a parallel existence would be our fate. I didn’t think about it, I just
presumed we would all manage, and live happily ever after.

My teachers were happy to see me back. Prof
K.L Sharma said, “ Ah yes, the girl who could take down every word in class and
reproduce them in the final exam.” I blanched. What a horrible reputation, but
yes, it was true. Eye, mind , hand and pen co-ordination were unusually good,
and most likely the teachers’ words were returned to them in pristine fashion,
but who would admit to it? The things we do as students, our teachers always
remember. My first experience was to be shown to my office, room 22, which had
so many cobwebs and was so disgusting, that I took a step back and thought,
“Mrs Havisham!” but then it was cleaned up, Dipankar got me a disused table
which was lyingin the sun and rain, but
yet undamaged, outside in the open yard in front of my room.I put up, in usual housewifely fashion,
books, pictures, dust collectors, and soon, the room was truly livable in, and
I proceeded to write many books on the once discarded table. One of the first
books that came out from Room 22 was Structure
andTransformation, an edited
work, where I got all the people who had taught me interesting things, to write
for me. They were from four different universities, and it took me ages to
collate it, with lots of disjunctions, since putting together such a motley
crew was hard. K.L Sharma handed me three long essays, and said “I don’t have
time to write an essay for you, but if there is anything you like, you are most
welcome.” So I studiously hammeredand
collaged and pinned sections together of the three copious works, abstracting
as I went along. It took me ages. Satish Saberwal agreed to write up his
lectures to us in1978 in the optional
course I took with him and so nine case studies were presented schematically,
which must have taken him the same time and labour but together, Sharma and
Saberwal gave us interesting vignettes of caste and mobility. Shiv and I were
not on talking terms, since I had chosen career over him, so I took an essay I
really liked because he had promised to give it to me before the Long March and
the Long Silence. Unlike the other essays which I standardised for uniformity,
I left that one alone, and it appears in that collection as a stand alone text.

Teaching was strenuous. My teachers thought
me capable, and immediately, on arrival, gave me a compulsory Mphil to teach,
and like a book end in the afternoon, I had to handlethe introductory sociology course to Language
students.Personally, I thought the
Elderswere totally mad.I was 39 years old, I had three daughters,
who went to school, and the youngest and the middle went to crèche as well.
Their opinion however was that,since I
had taught for thirteen years in Hindu College, and as J.S Gandhi put it, “You
had a great deal of teaching experience.” Dipankar was clear that everyone
should be teaching three courses a year, and went about with a form and a
checklist, to find out who did not. So Methodology of the Social Sciences,
Introductory Sociological Themes or Basic Concepts and Comparitive Theories in
Gender was my lot in the first year of teaching. It was interesting, fun,
meaningful. It was everything I had wanted, but the costs on the family were
huge. My eldest became responsible for collecting the two younger siblings from
differentcrèches after school. Since
she was only 13 at that time, it was annoying and too much of a responsibility,
heating their food and settling them into their homework. Suman, my maid, not
finding me at home in the afternoons, dropped all the breakables at home and so
dusting became a task which proved to be risk prone for the children. Shiv
returned home earlier than me, from CSDS on the collective bus which came back
to the residential office cooperative, and could be seen at 7.30 pm, looking
irate, holding a weeping child, or catatonically watching tv with them, while
wanting to get back to his writing. It was all quite a mess.

Soon after, the exhaustion levels caught up
with me, and I started to break bones, by falling off flat surfaces and even
ones. My husband began to escape to office, as the tv crews had started looking
out for him, and the invitations to travel abroad were consecutively coming in.
On one occasion, Sucheta Mahajan and I had taken our children to Lodi gardens
together, and since I had just come out of plaster for three broken bones in my
right arm, we were celebrating this, with pastries and an outing. I was so
delighted to be out in the park with the kids, that I came down an incline with
a pastry box in my hand, and fell, breaking six bones, with my hand stuck into
my wrist in the most alarming fashion. We went to the bone setting clinic which
had fixed my other arm just three weeks previously, and the doctor wanted to
admit me with anaesthesia, but I said “No, the kids have school tomorrow, and I
have to go to work.” So he gritted his teeth, and pulled my hand out from its
self enforced groove. I was in plaster again, this time my left arm, but since
it was winter holidays we went to Chennai, and it was not as hard as the
previous accident, since I had previous experience of being single handed and
appropriate clothing and skills.

JNU was always magical for me. To touch its
ground was to be healed, to be happy, and the students were so wonderful, and
still are, that I was dazzled. Shivhad
started travelling non stop, and going to office on week ends as well, and
soon, the invitations to speakwere so
plentiful, that he just boarded planes in continuity, with loyal friends and
conference mates in tow. I understood that it was a situation which was fait
accomplice. I would not give up JNU, he would not give up the success, and it’s
symbols which included absorption into corporate academics, though as a young
manin the late seventies,he had been so
much against projects and multinational funding. We were not judgemental of
each other, though both of us felt deeply, that the loss to the family because
of our career choices were tragic in themselves. When I told him that I wanted
to shift out with the girls to become a warden at a hostel in JNU, he looked
aghast, and said “But I wash all your clothes, and I pack the kids’ food, and
drop it at the crèche, what more can I do , and I send the clothes for ironing,
and do the shopping every morning, and see the kids to the bus stop, and I help
them with their homework, and phone every evening to see what they need for
crafts class.” All in one breath, and as a memory list of good husbanding,
perfectly true. But then, after this plaintive plea, he went off to England,
and was not seen or heard from, as was customary among jhola carrying academics
in the corporate funded international rat race. I packed the books which I
needed, the clothes, and the children, called a truck and went off to JNU. When
he came back from his tour, he came to JNU and stared bleakly at me, but we
fell into the whirl of our mutual obsessive workplaces, and didn’t look back.

Becoming warden of Ganga was an amazing
experience. I was in charge of three daughters of my own, and three hundred
daughters of others. Those three hundred who were residents never stopped
ringing my bell at all hours of day and night. It was really perplexing. I
thought, first,they were over-dependent
on us wardens because they didn’t have a life of their own. But it wasmore than bizarre. One night, a totalhulk of a man student, and an equally well built
woman student, both in the Phd programme rang my bell at mid night, saying they
were married, and she was a resident of Ganga, but she often stayed the night
at his hostel, but the men students were troubling them, and could I intervene
at the men’s hostel? Then there was thecase of the young woman who rang the bell at 8 am, on a winter morning,
and when I opened the door, she presented a crisp masala dosa on a plate, with
the cook standing nervously behind her. “So?” I asked in taciturn fashion. “Open
it, Ma’am.” So I flipped the dosa open, and saw a fat green chilly. “So?”The cook explained it was not a chilly, but a
caterpillar that had fallen through the chimney. Another time, a woman rang the
bell irate because they had not got eggs in the morning. I asked the cooks why
not, when I went to do the rounds, and they said laughing, “One day a week
sandwiches are the rule.” What a learning experience. It was endless. They
would ring my bell if they had lost the key to their rooms, they would ring it
if they did not have ten rupees to pay for some fine, they would just want to
see me in the afternoon for no known reason.My mother came to live with me, but then, theschool buses were being targeted by
terrorists, so she was 84years old and
got quite frightened. The children were in three different schools, as their
father had the grandiose idea that they should not be growing up in each
other’s shadow, so I was attending parent teacher meetings and my appearance as
a single parent was very visible. From being “looked after” as acompanionate wife for twenty years,I became responsible foreveryone, including a very vulnerable old mother,
who had locked up her Kerala residence and come to be withme and the children. There were 900 students
in the vicinity, (two men’s hostels adjacent to Ganga where we lived) so she
actually enjoyed it, including the eager calls and cries of the men students,
as they waited for the loved ones they courted so assiduously. Some of them
parked their motorcycles downstairs, and the beautiful Rapunzels would comb
their hairon their balconies, and carry
on desultory conversations, above my bed room, at all hours of day and night.
When Jhelum Night happened, or festivals and fairs pertaining to student
elections, Holi or demonstrations, or carnivals of food and rollicking, the
walls of my bedroom would actually shake from the voltage of the megaphones.
When Meera, my eldest had her 10th board exams, we had to ship her to friends’
houses, in Dakshinapuram, since February to April the sociability level of JNU
students is noticeably higher than other times.

Unfortunately, Ihad a very serious cerebral stroke in October
of 2000 which changed all our lives. I was quite maimed by it, but slowly
recovered with L-dopa and cortesone treatment for ten daysat Apollo Hospital,and the attention of excellent physicians,
and in time there was no sign of the stroke, which initiallyhad a scarring facial paralyses to go with
it. The Centre gave me six months as “non-teaching semester” since the clerk at
administration said sabbatical was only for those who had taught seven
years.Dipankar said in a very kind way,
that I.P Desai never left his campus, and the world came to see him, so it
would be the same for me, even if I never travelled. He had tea with me most
mornings till he developed a clot, several years later,in his leg from too much airplane travelling,
and found teaching three courses a year beyond his physical capability, which
is sometimes a function of time and endless committee meetings and selection
board responsibilities of older faculty. Two decades previously, when I was
aresearch student at Delhi University,
working with Veena Das,Andre Beteille
had said to me sonorously one morning when our paths crossed, “Lecturers
lecture, Readers read, and Professors Profess.” Both he, and T.K, Oommen in JNU
have always maintained thatthey
prioritised teaching over travelling in their active years in the University.

I continued to teach my three courses a
year, and to write and publish. My healing was not rapid, it was slow and
steady.I continued with my duties as
hostel warden thanks to the really wonderful support staff whom we had. The
Manager of theGanga hostel was a
retired army havildar with a very neat writing,who drove in on his scooter from Gurgaon every morning, and who was
paid, in 1999, very low wages a month, for his onerous duties.I was never able to solve some of the
mysteries of of JNU, but they were probably generated by the UGC since when VC
Asis Dattapaid the cooks 10,000 rupees
a month as he said they worked very hard, the bureaucratic backlash was huge.
So the student auditfor daily wage
workers, on behalf of JNUSU, was a typical revolutionary act for which I was
always grateful.

I
asked Asis Datta for a house on VC quota a year after I had the stroke, because
ABVP students took a procession through my house since I was chief warden and
did not permit out of quota accommodation. ABVP students wantedto be on par with AISA, who had an age old
adda in Ganga.Since rooms were
allocated on the bases of an administration prepared list, (and not on the
whims of political parties,) by refusing to give in to the political cadre, my
action brought daily protests, and I thought I should look out for myselfas an academic and the children’s future.
Asis Datta gave me aneat little house
in Poorvanchal,though committee members
said since I had recovered from my stroke, why should I be accommodated out of
turn? I lived there happily for ten years, though unfortunately my mother who
was 86 had to go to an old age home in Kerala, because she could not climb
stairs and the clerks in administration said, “Madam, rules are rules, you have
to live in Poorvanchal for two years atleast.” The children were distraught
when Mum left because she had put me on my feet, after my illness, and every
morning, she was always ready with breakfast, missing notebooks, and the lost
belt or the vanished socks, triumphantly producing them as morning anxiety
built up beforethe school bus turned up
at 7 am. The parents of children at the bus stop became my support group, and
all of them were eminent scholars and writers, so in a way, the children grew
up in a commune of intellectuals who safeguarded them. I can never forget Avijit
Sen turning up in his red bulb ambassador to pick up Meera from her exam on his
way to the Planning Commission, but I had also turned up in an auto rickshaw,
and he said irritably, because he was probably late on his deputation work “But
Jayati told you I would pick her up.” Neeladri Bhattacharya and Chitra Joshi,
Praveen and Smita, Ashwani Deshpande, Chitra Harshvardhan, the Rathis, so many
who just picked up the younger siblings and took them to sports day and other
functions, while I took class, walked home, refused cakes and celebrations and
fried foods, and read in bed.I owe the
benediction of keeping my job equally to my friends, Ratna and Mani, who
werealmost local guardians tome and my children, and my visits to
Ramanasrmam twice a year, and to my homeopath and confidante Mohammad Qasim,
every month, and to my yoga teacher Ajay Shastri, who worked in some underpaid
capacity in the JNU sports stadium, but was friend, philosopher and physician
to so many of us.

My teachers were in the first decade of the
21st century beginning to retire. One by one, with grand farewells
and acknowledgement of 25 to 38 years of service they went on to do other
interesting things, and have alternative careers as catalysts of the state and
the Sociological Association. We had eight departures during the years 1997 to
2011, and were fourteen teachers for many years, so thework load was huge. Each one of us, who
remained and graduated to be Elders ourselvers, were responsible for 12 to 20
Phd students at any given time. After seven years of waiting in the threshold
when T.K Oommen retired in 2004, I got the Classical Thinkers Course to teach,
and it was a great moment, since that was what I liked best as a course. I also
taught Historical Method in Sociology, a paper which our teachers Yogendra
Singh and T.K Oommen had passed as an optional Mphil course, many decades ago
when they founded the department. Itaught Gender Studies, Sociology of Religion and Modes of Cultural Analyses.One year, I taught Economy and Society, since
my former teacherM.N. Panini wanted to
go for a stint abroad, and it was tough, butby chance I was blessed with a class which had ten students from
Presidency College that year, so everything took a natural Marxist turn towards
understanding the market and consumption.

The students were always scintillating,
respectful and hardworking and continue to be. Even if I had personally missed
the Marxist boat, though my father was a card carrying Marxist in the 1950s,
and now the Ambedkarite one, no one taxed me about it, as writing was a form of
practice for me. I learnt a great deal from the students, both the M. A as well
as the researchers. They came with their hopes and aspirations, some had four
years, others seven in JNU, to fulfil their ambitions. I helped them as best as
I could, since my mentor Leela Dube, who was my colleague at NMML in 1989 to
1993, had instilled in me a certain tenderness toward younger scholars by her
own behaviour to those of us who were perhaps thirty or forty years younger
than her, but were treated as equals. My JNU teachers were also very much
around, and both Y Singh and T.K. Oommen brought to the Centre their grandeur
and their memories. They made the Centre seem like a legacy, and though they
were growing older, they kept up the momentum of conference appearances by
saying something new everytime they were on the platform.

When a phalanx of women first joined in the
90s, beginning with Patricia Uberoi, the old guard were a little hesitant about
our polemical perspectives as feminists. The stance that “gender neutrality was
value neutrality” was slowly whittled away by the presence of so many of us who
were recruited in that decade, who brought the intense strands of anthropology,
feminism and dalit experiences. Our teachers adapted very fast, and distilled
these into their own teaching curricula. Nandu Ram had been a very steadfast
voice since the late 70s of the crucial interventionist method of secular dalit
interpretations. He would begin his first M.A class to newcomersby saying, “Is it possible that humans can be
born from the feet or the mouth?” As Dean of School of Social Sciences in
2011before he retired, his term
coincided with my chairpersonship of CSSS. He was meticulous with ledgers and
records. The Ambedkar Chair which never found an occupant after his departure
had been vitalised by his experience as an intellectualwho knew hundreds of people whom he networked
with and invited to his conferences.

All
our teachers in CSSS gave us the feeling that the inviolability of work was the
only refuge. We really knew nothing about them personally, and Nandu Ram often
complained that the generation, ( which is today the “old generation”) never
bothered to drop by to the Professors roomsand chat. We just did not have the time and to tell the truth, nor did
they as they were famous intellectuals constantly writing or managing the
Sociological Association. We were busy with duties at home and at work, and had
no social skills. Just getting past the details of the day’s work was
exhausting. Our teachers had wives who ran the house, paid the phone bill,and left them free to read, write and travel.
We were run off our feet with doing both, chores at home and work, whether men
or women. To admit to this, may be politically incorrect, but then, that’s the
Sociological imperative, for Feminists, to speak of the hidden.

When I joined in 1997, the faculty meetings
were like football matches. The men raised their voices, there were
contestational spaces, and if the women intervened they would shout louder to
drown out our voices. It would get quite noisy, and on one occasion when the
different opinions became a site of public display, Nandu Ram almost wept
because of the lack of courtesies. What our teachers managed very well, and
which we are not yet perfect with, was the façade. They had huge differences
among themselves, and they were open about it in faculty meetings. At public
occasions and in the corridors, they would greet each other with politeness and
yes, affection. It’s a tribute to these courtly manners thatwe, the middle generation, tried to keep up
appearances but the relationships were much more brittle, given the general
climate of distress and psychological turmoil in the city in which we lived in.
However, the students were never pawns in the display of differences, and the
ability to keep the Centre cohesive depended on the sophistication of our
cultural abilities to hide our feelings. Centre for the Study of Social Systems
was always run on the smooth, oiled and natural bureaucratic abilities of our
teachers. The managerial administrative staff was always very supportive and
even if there was the natural turn over of secretaries and Administrative
Officers, the spine remained constant, allowing for both memory and filing
cabinets to be in synchrony.

We can only thank the Fates for their
generosity in keeping the “just balance”, as Simone Weil calledit, and when CSSS was ranked as one of the
best Sociology departments in the world, it seemed a chance but opportune
moment to thank our teachers, across the different universities in India and
abroad, all still aliveand working,
innovating and thinking, though edging into their seventies and eighties.

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Udtha Punjab takes the story of modernisation
forward bydepictingantiheroes as pawning their motherland, in
the name of diaspora Punjabis, who bring back cultic forms of hip hop and
addiction to cocaine to levels which are as huge as the opium wars of the 18th
and 19th century. Who should we blame, ask the journalists, who
follow the film maker, and with the typical courage of the Indian newspaper men
and women, follow the real addicts to their various dens. The parallelsbetween fiction and reality are extreme. Each
one faces their God, the film maker seems to say, in some cases, it is science
and rationality, in others it is their faith and optimism, and in yet others,
it is their dealer. Mexico is the analogy, as the relation between the drug
dealer and the State, whether the police or the politician is earmarked for
special attention. It is interesting that television brought visuals of how
rehabilitation centres in Punjab were involved inthe trade in opiates, which were handed out
to patients for helping them phase out, but infact were addictive too.

In Jamaica, Rastafarianism legitimates
cannabis use, since it is freely available, and users refer to it as the gift
of Ganga, brought to them by indentured labour. The memories of slaves from
Africa and India combines in this friendly atmosphere of mutual recognition.
Like Bill Clinton, it is impossible not to have inhaled in a country, where the
very air is potent with marijuana. However, the inhabitants are not
complaining, and what happens in Jamaica remains in Jamaica. An important
musician, who had his hashish confiscated from him by a Policeman, was later
returned it, because it was of such good quality, much to the amusement of both
parties. The judgementality of good and evil is blurred in many cultures,
because as a social given somethings may be permissible in some cultures and
some may not. Cultic evil, cultic death, lodges of secret obsessive and violent
behaviour are known in all cultures at all times.At New York Airport, I not only had to go
through the body scan like everyone else, I was put through the most alarming
check by a young police woman in a manner, which led me to ask her, “Aren’t
your body scans efficient enough?”, but she prodded and pried in full public
view, till I took off my sweater as well, and then, she said, after using a
rubber mallet and gloves to check my body yet once again, and passing her gloves and tool through yet
another scan, “You can go back to your normal life.” Oh New York! No
residue on my skin, and I was sent on my way. Two women in Burkhas who had gone
through the same treatment were collecting themselves inanother corner, and one said to the other, in
perfect European diction, “That was a very seminal examination!”

People feel cornered all the time, someone
or the other is always targeting another. The feeling is so comprehensive, it
can no longer go by the name of racism, or casteism or male chauvinism, since
the women as representatives of any ideology can be very emphatic too. about their so called "agency".

One
can imagine Gandhi refusing to be bullied by the coach inspector. There are
many of us, who have gone from day to day, saying to the honey pot crusader,
yes, you have an internet site from which you can hack anyone’s email id, but
what the hell, you live in hell and so do I, so let’s just say, this is planet
earth, and you are welcome!The most
significant thing abouthackers’
creative commons, is that their own fields are never accessible.

This tolerance for one another’s
disadvantage is what makes mutual recognition possible. It is what makes us
look at the smiling faces of assassins, who say they are doing what they do
because the Lord told them, or because they feel called to do it, or it’s fun
anyway. We no longer understand the rage of others, but we are moved by their ineptitude,
because as very young people, caught up in one religious ideology or other,
they leave such a trail of destruction behind, including their own corpses.
Sociologists are trained to communicate to their students that God is a social
construction, God is a social representation, when the Gods are forgotten, they
die. Udtha Punjab with it’s loss of the sacred, it’s loss of the humane
represents just such an entity. It shows a new generation born of the Green
Revolution, either as migrant labour, or as a quasi propertied classbeing ransacked by it’s own incompetence.
This is the generation that has spawned out of the hatred of the 1980s, and has
victimised its own children by its boredom and it’s frustration. Whoever
thought it would be the “white” (cock/coke as the film’s character Tony Singh
puts it) cultural revolution that would kill Punjab and Haryana with its axes
of being a remnant culture, where forms of feudalism would surface in new ways.
Ideologies remain where they do, in the heads of people. The real truth is
survival, and the codes would remain different for the people who agree to
engage in some transaction. For the generation born in the euphoria of the
1950s, the culture of contemporary greed is by itself variegated, and requires its own
analyses.